Science

Walk into a church on a clear day, and you can feel the light change. Reds seem to glow from within, yellows land softly on stone, blues deepen the air. It looks like pure artistry, but a lot of that effect comes from something the makers never saw directly: nanoscale structure inside the glass. Himadri Sahoo, a postdoctoral researcher in the Adaptive Quantum Optics group, takes us from coloured church windows to modern photonic chips, showing how old ideas about light are still used in cutting-edge research.

Every recipe website seems convinced that you simply cannot make banana bread without first reliving someone’s traumatic childhood memory. But I’m not here to get sentimental about a fake sob story. I’m using a recipe format for a very simple reason: at the University of Twente, we “bake” mini-hearts in the lab. They squish, they jiggle, they contract. And the steps to make them read surprisingly like a cookbook minus the calories, plus some stem cells and all the fun.

Smart cities promise to make us safer. Cameras on every corner that detect violence and algorithms that alert the police before anyone calls. For many, that sounds reassuring. But how safe do these systems really make us, and more importantly, for whom?

Every year, Sinterklaas travels from Spain to the Netherlands by his trusted steamboat. But such an old boat is, of course, anything but clean. Because Sinterklaas wants to do his bit for a better environment, this year he wants to investigate how he can make his steamboat more sustainable.

Every year, Sinterklaas and his Pieten travel across the entire country to deliver presents. But last year, things did not go quite as planned. To keep an overview, Sinterklaas decided to visit all cities in alphabetical order. It sounded logical, but somewhere around the letter P he was already hopelessly behind schedule. Time was running out, and the route became increasingly illogical.